Amazon.com Tests New Home Page Design

Amazon.com is testing a redesign of its home page. The company said the site has grown to include over 40 "departments" since its launch in 1995 as a book-selling site, and it wants to make it easier for customers to find items in all departments.

The former head of eBay's developer program Jeffrey McManus, who also worked at Yahoo before starting his own company, wrote about Amazon's redesign on his blog and added his two-cents (he's "not wild" about the changes). He also wrote of the testing, "in the exciting world of springing jarring changes onto the users of unreasonably large web sites, this is known as "bucket-testing," explaining why only certain people see the new design (http://mcmanus.typepad.com/grind/2007/09/amazon-bucket-t.html).

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com.

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